It has been discovered that the medical outcome for a patient suffering from severe brain trauma or from ischemia caused by stroke or heart attack is improved if the patient is cooled below normal body temperature (38° C.). Furthermore, it is also accepted that for such patients, it is important to prevent hyperthermia (fever) even if it is decided not to induce hypothermia.
As recognized by the present invention, the above-mentioned advantages in regulating temperature can be realized by cooling the patient's entire body. Moreover, the present invention understands that since many patients already are intubated with central venous catheters for other clinically approved purposes anyway such as drug delivery and blood monitoring, providing a central venous catheter that can also cool the blood requires no additional surgical procedures for those patients. A cooling central venous catheter is disclosed in the above-referenced parent application.
Other cooling catheters have been disclosed but unfortunately do not recognize the above-noted desirability of combining conventional central venous line functions with a temperature regulation function. The present invention, however, makes this critical observation and provides the solutions set forth herein.